Some Christians claim to have got the gift of sharing in Christ's crucifixion
by being given nail wounds from God as if they were crucified themselves.
These marks are called the stigmata. Some experts feel the wounds are
self-induced by the way a sick mind can influence the body. The evidence is in
how some Muslim mystics seem to carry the marks of Muhammad's sufferings and
how some people reproduce long healed injuries as if from nowhere when there
is a trigger.

In The Word as a Physiological and Therapeutic Factor by
V Finne written in 1927 we read, "“Subject M, 35 years old, easily suggestible,
was put up into a state of suggested sleep after which a copper coin was applied
to the inner side of her left forearm with the suggestion that it was a
burning-hot metal disk; as a result the subject sustained a heavy burn and felt
acute pain.

After awakening she was continuously watched by one of the physicians, a member
of the conference. According to the record of observation, twenty-five minutes
after the aforesaid suggestion and upon awakening, the skin was red at the point
of the ‘burn’, fifty-five minutes later, a swelling was observed; two and one
half hours later a white spot appeared in the centre of the ‘burned’ spot, and
three and one half hours later a blister formed."

The subject shows the power of the mind. Delusion
can create marks on the body in some people.

Under deep hypnosis a suggestion to the effect of ‘burning’ makes a second
degree burn on that spot on the body of the subject where the hypnotist or
operator wanted it to occur.”

Elizabeth K was born in 1902 and was a lady of tremendously vivid imagination
and who suffered from hysteria. Stigmata and tears of blood were induced in
Elizabeth by her psychiatrist using hypnosis. Like all stigmatics she gave
evidence of suffering from multiple personality disorder. It was found that
when she was able to imagine herself going through the crucifixion so strongly
that it was like reality to her that the wounds appeared. Her psychiatrist Dr
Lechler hypnotised her to believe she was being crucified and he saw stigmata
appear. This confirmed his belief that people with unusual imaginative powers
and strong mystical tendencies can do things nearly everybody else can’t do.
One of these things is that they can make their bodies produce stigmata just
by mind power.

A hoax has been suspected all because of one photo allegedly showing the
subject bleeding from outside the eyes while Lechler the psychiatrist was
claiming that the blood came from inside the eyelids. So the problem is that
the eyes look too clear for somebody that was bleeding from inside the lids.
But if there was a little blood it would soon have been wiped by the tears
which would have moved the blood from the two corners of the eye down the
face. We see this in the photograph and we must remember that when the picture
was taken, Elizabeth had been bleeding before Lechler got around to taking the
photograph (page 95, The Bleeding Mind) so the eye bleeding might have just
stopped so that her eyes looked clean but the lids were still stained with
blood. View the photo.

If Lechler had been hoaxing he would not have made the mistake of
photographing a woman who had just plastered blood around her eyelids. It has
been complained that the witnesses were just Lutheran deaconesses and that
Lechler admitted he could not always prove that Elizabeth was not piercing
herself (page 21, The Stigmata and Modern Science). But Lechler was convinced
he was sure she was watched well enough at times so she could not have been
faking all the time. And moreover, he noted that the wounds lasted only as
long as the hypnotic suggestion did which was 1-2 days (page 21, The Stigmata
and Modern Science) and we know that wounds inflicted by natural means last
longer. Anyway, why would Elizabeth fake? She was always an obscure and
reliable and conscientious person.

Elizabeth K’s stigmata is nothing compared to that of the people we have been
reading about. The wounds were not very impressive which indicates that she
did not inflict them herself for she would have made them look more than just
a few pinpricks. But they are real and show that suggestion has a part to play
in causing stigmata. Perhaps, had she had the right triggers in her brain and
nervous system that only a few seem to have she would have been able to
produce wounds to match theirs.

With Elizabeth K we also have Eve from the Three Faces of Eve who was able to
produce burn marks just by reliving her experience of being abused under
hypnosis and we have Mook from Hamburg who took wounds on his head like the
crown of thorns but only when he took heart attacks (page 23, The Stigmata and
Modern Science). Some have thought Mook may have been somebody the Devil was
experimenting with which is nonsense. The Devil has miracle power and he does
not need to test it.

The stigmatists were all extremely emotional people except in the cases of
obvious fraud. It would not be unfair to say they are all hysterical or
emotionally unbalanced and Bourru, Burot, Charcot and Bourneville were known
to have had a little success in making wounds appear by suggestion on their
hysterical patients (page 15, The Stigmata and Modern Science).

Some people with emotional disorders have been found to exhibit inexplicable
bruising swelling and bleeding through the skin a condition known in medical
journals as psychogenic purpura. There is plenty of stigmata that has not been
invested with religious significance. Autoerythrocyte sensitization a disorder
that makes people reject their own blood can be an explanation for many
stigmatist cases.

In 1989 Giorgio Bongiovanni went to Fatima on pilgrimage. He came back with
stigmata. He has daily wounds in the forehead, hands, side and feet. The
doctors have been baffled at his blood level being normal despite bleeding
every day and the absence of infection. The doctors observed the blood
coagulating incredibly fast in a few seconds. Sceptics are at a loss to
explain how a man with wounds in his feet would fake stigmata in his hands
when it is now known that Jesus would have been nailed through the wrists.
This stigmatist claims that his miracle wounds are evidence not for orthodox
Catholicism but for aliens, Jesus and Mary using spaceships, and his being the
reincarnation of Francisco Marto, the little boy who had seen Mary at Fatima
in 1917. Despite his prophecy that Jesus would return at the end of the
twentieth century Jesus hasn’t shown up. I bring this up to illustrate the
point that here is a man who claims super-science caused his stigmata and
stigmata cannot be used as evidence to draw or lure people into thinking the
Catholic Church must be the right religion.

Professor Oscar Ratnoff found a woman who bled from the hair follicles on her
thigh. No wound caused this but it goes some way to show that stigmata may be
a skin disease caused by the combination of body and mind (page 1333, The X
Factor, Issue 48, Marshall Cavendish, 1998.

From http://www.assap.org/newsite/articles/Stigmata.html ‏

There have been non-miraculous instances of stigmata. It is an unusual
phenomenon but not a miracle.

“The majority of claimants seem to be displaying a psychosomatic response to
their religious fervour. That the body can will itself to produce such marks
has evidence outside of the realm of stigmata claims and has even been put to
the test. A Swedish girl known as Maria was badly beaten up when she was 23;
after that time she would, every few weeks, produce bleeding from head, ear
and eyelids. A doctor examining her concluded that she could produce bleeding
at will, from no visible wounds, when she picked arguments with other patients
and reached a certain emotional state.”

“Research seems, however, to have identified a mechanism by which the body
can, in certain extreme emotions, manifest strange markings, producing a truly
extraordinary, and highly visible, mystery phenomenon.”

“The marks appear naturally, as a psychosomatic response to religious fervour.
This is the most favoured theory with modern researchers. It has been tested
and it has parallels outside of the claims of the stigmata. The condition is
known as psychogenic purpura (spontaneous haemorrhaging with no obvious
cause). It is rare, but there are several cases of people who produce on
themselves the evidence of some previous trauma. In one case a woman who had
been abused during childhood manifested the spontaneous appearance of her
bruise marks during psychotherapy. British psychiatrist Robert Moody reported
the case of an army officer whom he had treated for stress disorders and
sleepwalking. During these times the officer produced the marks on his body of
ropes where he had been tied up earlier. Moody photographed these wounds and
saw them bleed. In the field of UFO and 'close encounter' research, there is
the well documented case of Barney Hill who believed that he was kidnapped by
aliens and subjected to a medical examination. Reliving the experience years
later under hypnosis, he manifested a ring of warts around his genitals,
corresponding to where he believed devices had been attached during the
'abduction'. In fact many people who claim to have undergone 'alien
abductions' display marks on their bodies, and bleeding, from wounds they
believe were inflicted by medical examination by aliens. Many other people who
have been in close proximity to UFOs manifest a variety of marks. Some may be
attributable to the object, for example, chest wounds received by Stephen
Michalak in Canada. But some seem more likely to be the psychosomatic response
to UFOs, for example triangular markings received by Dr X in southern France,
in 1968.”

Some modern stigmatists do automatic writing, a spiritualistic phenomenon
forbidden by the Church and the Bible.

”Heather's writings were channelled while she was in trance; she never
remembered the writing, only the beginning as she reached for her pencil and
the end when she 'came round'. But a few people were witness to the
extraordinary speed of her writing; several pages filled in minutes. One
witness said she watched Heather's hand moving at 'abnormal speed'.”

Her stigmata then if real would be evidence that spiritualism is true if the
foolish simplistic religious reasoning that miracles are proof for the
religion they happen in are true.

From http://www.assap.org/newsite/articles/Stigmata.html ‏

Let Fr Herbert Thurston have the last word on stigmata,

“The impression left upon me has been that the subjects
who were so favoured or afflicted were all suffering from pronounced and often
hysterical neuroses. Many of them were intensely devout (of course it is
only in the case of people whose thoughts were concentrated on religious motives
that one would expect to find this type of manifestation) but in others piety
was combined with eccentricities and with apparent dissociations of personality
which were very strange and not exactly edifying. I find it difficult to believe
that God could have worked miracles to accredit such people as his chosen
friends and representatives.”

Padre Pio was foremost in his mind for he wrote about him
carefully - and with grave doubts.